Evaluators Give Schools’ Dropout Prevention Effort an ‘F’

The major effort by San Diego city schools to help students at risk of failing their grade--as well as at risk of becoming dropouts--has itself failed most of those students during its three-year history, school trustees were told Tuesday in a pair of highly critical evaluations.

Without significant improvements in the district’s ability to turn students around, the more than 18,000 now identified as at risk--15% of the almost 120,000 students in the district--will continue to fail, the studies said. In addition, a high percentage will continue to end up as dropouts, with blacks and Latinos showing up in disproportionate numbers.

The reports, one each on efforts at the elementary and secondary level, criticized principals, teachers and central office administrators alike for drawing up plans that fail to address why students are not learning, that fail to do more than exhort students to do better at what they now do badly and that fail to suggest new ways of learning to motivate students or involve their parents.

In many cases, students have underlying health or family problems--often connected to poverty--which affect their school performance but which teachers and counselors fail to take into account, either because of overwork or lack of training, the evaluation department reports say. The few students who improve do so on their own, according to the reports.

The only bright signs found occur at a few schools experimenting on their own under the district’s site autonomy program with innovative ways of reaching students who are doing poorly in school for a variety of reasons. Evaluators also found potential lessons for the district in the fact that they could find no 7th- or 10th-grade Asian students--the two grades examined at the secondary level--at risk anywhere in San Diego city schools during the first semester of 1988-89, the period chosen for the study. Previous studies for the district have talked of strong parental support and respect for learning among Asian groups.

Using case studies of students, evaluators looked at the promotion and retention policy of the district, the nation’s eighth-largest urban school system. That policy, passed in 1985, placed the district between those advocates urging that more students each year be retained by grade and those who believe grade failure stigmatizes a student for life.

It calls for students in danger of being kept back a grade to be identified by teachers each fall and then be given an intervention plan to bring them up to grade level--as measured by reading tests at the elementary level or by graduation credits at the secondary level.

Although schools identify such students properly, the intervention plans have not worked, schools Supt. Tom Payzant conceded Tuesday.

“Four years ago, we tried to have the idea that you don’t simply have a child repeat something that was not successful,” Payzant said. “But what happened is that we were lulled by our own rhetoric.”

But Payzant said that, even if the district improves academic intervention, it “alone may be simplistic, given the powerful needs of the students identified in the case studies.” The studies told of students with difficult family situations, with inadequate food on the table, with lack of support from parents or friends.

The most important factor, new board president Kay Davis said, is “we are not cutting it with the bottom-end kid. There may be a lot of reasons but, based on these reports, it’s pointless for us to be holding kids back, if we’re just doing the same (ineffective) stuff over.”

Davis argued that more needs to be done at the elementary level, “to be more aggressive” because otherwise the students will be promoted into junior and senior highs, where it is even more difficult to help a failing student.

New board vice president Shirley Weber bemoaned a lack of caring comments from teachers and principals in the report.

“There seemed to be no heart in the process, no enthusiasm for turning around students, to see the staff expressing some concern. . . . The kids (in the study) keep saying, ‘No one really cares.’ ”

Evaluation department director Betty Tomblin said later she was also disappointed with the lack of caring expressed in the report, “but there are many teachers who do care, but many may be tired.”

The board ordered Payzant to meet with community leaders involved with dropout prevention and recovery programs to come up with a list of recommendations. Trustees cited several efforts being tried at individual schools in pointing out that at least some educators are working successfully to help at-risk students succeed.

Payzant agreed, saying he hopes the district’s autonomy plans will bring forth a variety of ideas that can be widely tried.

“Maybe we should rethink our entire approach” to at-risk students, Payzant said, pushing his belief that not all students learn at the same pace. He reiterated his interest Tuesday in programs in which, for example, elementary students might be placed in a multigrade situation to master the prescribed curriculum over three to four years. High school students might be given a year beyond the existing four-year system to complete required credits without stigma, he said.